I hate Trojan. I apparently hate it so much that I forgot to mention the NES edition's two-player versus mode, which is limited and boring, but still interesting for an 8-bit game from 1986.

I also forgot to mention the Trojan arcade flyer. It’s actually not that bad of an illustration on the whole, but there’s one thing about it that cracks me up: Trojan Guy’s face.

The flyer doubled as the NES game’s cover art, though it was boxed in by the same hi-tech, neon-is-the-future grid than Capcom used for all of its early NES releases. And that’s a shame, because it made Trojan Guy way too small for us to appreciate his baleful, huge-chinned visage. He’s going to destroy the fuck out of those evil ones.

I realize it's far too late to make some post recapping everything that happened to me in 2007, and that's just as well, because I decided not to write about it and ended up playing El Viento instead. I didn't like 2007 anyway.

But man, do I like El Viento. It's hardly the best action-platform game for the old Sega Genesis, but I can't get enough of all the thoroughly insane crap that Wolf Team threw into it with no regard for logic or cohesion. This delicate theme runs through the game itself, what with Al Capone driving a hi-tech tank (in the 1920s, no less) on the first level, Annet surfing on a dolphin in the fourth stage, and the second level being a Mount Rushmore maze full of trampolines and smiley-faced gun turrets.

Yet it's even more nuts in the story sequences, which are nonsensical mash-ups of Indiana Jones movies, Prohibition gangster stuff, and vaguely Lovecraftian conspiracies about burbling preternatural gibbous squamous eldritch horrors from unknowable realms beyond the veils of space and time. It's also hard to tell just who's saying what, since almost every cutscene consists of a single bizarrely framed image.